Slackers

??? they are attempting to cover a staggering 97% of Americans with 4G LTE. They just agreed to terms to purchase T-Mobile, the largest competitor using similar technology for $39 BILLION....They just bought out all of Convergys assets for $320 million, and they just attempted to purchase more 700 MHz spectrum from the government.

Can't say ATT doesn't have the money to build out HSPA+ 21mbps & LTE beyond that, they have well over 90m customers, so they definetly have boatloads of money. They just aren't doing the same things with their revenues that Verizon is. At least Verizon is taking care of their customers NOW!!! RIGHT NOW I am getting 10/15/20+mbps on my Samsung Droid Charge, NOW, not 2014.

EV-DO may be comparable in your area, but in general it's much slower than the 3G GSM standards. If you're getting 1.5 mbps on EVDO in your area that's flying, that's nearly twice the network average.

The 4G standard qualcom (cdma) offered up was called UMB (ultra mobile broadband) which was abandoned because of it's inferiority to LTE.

UMTS/HSPA does have a very long upgrade path, if I was at&t I would have waited a much longer on LTE deployment and deployed many more releases of HSPA. LTE will take networks further as it evolves but HSPA would have been competitive for years. It is very cheep to deploy new releases over an existing system. HSPA release 11 supports a downlink of 672 mbps.

at&t is also dragging on LTE to make the congress think the buy out of T-Mobile is imperative for at&t to stay competitive. If they focused on LTE like they have focused on the HSPA back haul, congress wouldnt even consider letting at&t buy T-mobile. Its all stratagy, PC World has proven time and time again tha at&t has had the faster 3G network. EDGE is faster then Verizons 3G, at&t is willing to sacrifice a few years to allow back haul, and buy outs happen. Once it is all said and done, at&t will have the most reliable network with the fastest speeds again cause they will have all that back haul, so average speeds will be much greater then Verizon in the long run.

It doesn't suck, but I'm a student at college and when every third person that is within a square mile of you has an iPhone, the network tends to be crippled... meanwhile, my friend who happens to have a Verizon USB stick on her computer is streaming Netflix without a problem. Cuz of course the school Wi-Fi is worse than any cell network that covers us.

Jellz said:It doesn't suck, but I'm a student at college and when every third person that is within a square mile of you has an iPhone, the network tends to be crippled... meanwhile, my friend who happens to have a Verizon USB stick on her computer is streaming Netflix without a problem. Cuz of course the school Wi-Fi is worse than any cell network that covers us.

Got the same problem, ATT is our companies cellular provider. So they've got antennas inside the building. But come break/lunch time the network slows down because everyone's using ATT. Verizon guys, no problem.